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Symptoms: NVMe Drive Disappeared After Reboot

  • A Dell PowerEdge R750 server was rebooted for scheduled kernel patching.
  • After reboot, the application team reports their local NVMe data volume is missing.
  • Running lsblk shows only the two SATA boot drives; the NVMe device (/dev/nvme0n1) is gone.
  • The drive was a 3.84TB Samsung PM9A3 in PCIe slot 3, confirmed working before the reboot.
  • dmesg shows PCIe enumeration errors referencing the slot.
  • The drive LED on the front panel is not lit (no activity, no fault).
  • BIOS POST screen does not list the NVMe drive in the storage summary.
  • No physical maintenance was performed on the server during the reboot window.
  • The NVMe drive holds a local cache tier for a distributed database; the cluster is degraded.